


like a still life (captured you)

by biggrstaffbunch



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: M/M, Self-Indulgent, Steve sets stuff on fire and that's not period appropriate imo, also they move kinda fast but listen, life is short
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-07
Updated: 2014-07-07
Packaged: 2018-02-07 20:11:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1912203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/biggrstaffbunch/pseuds/biggrstaffbunch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve draws, but Bucky doesn't get it. Until he does. </p><p>[Pre-serum fumbling in the dark. These kids, tsk tsk.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	like a still life (captured you)

**Author's Note:**

> Based on a Tumblr prompt! This is pretty shmoopy and full of needless pining. That is pretty much my only mindset after 6 pm, so I apologize. Hope you enjoy anyway!

When Steve thinks of Bucky, it's as a collection of broken images rather than words.

Maybe it's the artist in him. He's always been a little fanciful, at any rate. All that time tucked away in bed, or lost inside his own brain, watching the world move on without him. But the fact remains that whenever one James Buchanan Barnes is mentioned, Steve doesn't think  _best friend_  or  _brother_ or even  _that time my dick got hard in church because he breathed in my ear_. Nah, Steve thinks of this:

Fireworks exploding on the Fourth of July, colors shattering the stillness of the summer sky. 

A silk tie, the subtle  _shnick_ as it loops and unravels, puddled material on the bedroom floor before the moon rises to hang in the window.

The ice blue of rain slamming against the pavement, explosive but familiar, the sound as Brooklyn as it gets.

Home, just the shape and sound and feel of it. A tenement, a rumpled bed, the rickety old fire escape, the curl of smoke in the air and a smile that's charmed too many panties down too many pairs of lithesome legs.

Honestly, when Steve thinks of Bucky, he thinks of  _everything_. Every minute, mundane detail of his entire life. Because Bucky's steeped in each cell and atom of it, has been since they first met.  
  
So when Steve draws, when he painstakingly sketches stuff that everyone else thinks is boring or uninspired—fruit bowls and fingers and shadows, the curl of hair against a forehead or a discarded pair of shoes in a narrow hallway—he's the only who knows that it's actually a love letter that just he can read, little slips and pieces of ardent feeling. Eternal hope.

It's his goddamned opus to the first person he's ever loved, and...

And no one will ever know.

Steve is a dreamer, but he's a dreamer who lives in the body of someone who’s kind of had to be a pragmatist, too. Bucky is his world just like Steve knows he's Bucky's world, knows that when Bucky whispers "You an' me, Stevie, we're gonna live and die together," it's not just drunken ramblings, it's a promise. But it's not the  _same_ , not really. Not when Bucky's off with another dame every other night, not when Steve sometimes feels like he can’t sleep with the force of his flushed, restless dreams, only to see Bucky snore away, without a care in the world.

And it's okay. It's okay, it really is. So long as Bucky is alive and well and by Steve’s side, somehow, someway, Steve is fine.

He’ll keep watching, and drawing, and no one ever has to know there’s anything but charcoal and paper living between the pages of his sketchbook.

No one at all.

 

|

 

Of course, in the end, Bucky finds the sketchbook.

Steve supposes he ought to have anticipated that, probably. Living in a shabby one bedroom flat with a guy who thinks personal space is a funny joke, well. It means nothing is sacred, not really.

So one night, Bucky comes home from work, plops onto Steve's bed, and pulls the sketchbook out from under Steve's pillow. As fluid as anything, like he knew it was there all along. Which he most likely did, the little sneak. Steve scowls. The scowl fades when Bucky opens the sketchbook with interest and starts turning the pages.

Casually, like he's got no idea of the timebomb he's got in his hands, he begins to thumb through every secret that Steve's kept tamped down in his stupid, aching chest for the past five years. 

Easy as you please, he traces a drawing with his fingers, and says, "Stevie, these are  _great_." His eyes are luminous when he looks up, proud and impressed and fond. "How come you've been hiding 'em?"

Steve swallows the mortification that had lodged in his throat since the second Bucky sprawled on his bed. He lies, "Haven't been hiding 'em. Just didn't think they were worth showing anyone, that's all."

Bucky makes a face and mimes thwacking Steve over the head with the book. "Dummy," he says, and  _Christ_ , the affection in his tone is grounding and dizzying all at once.

"Takes one to know one," Steve shoots back, and fidgets to stop from grabbing the book back. Bucky's eyes have dropped down to a page with fragments of body parts, elegant neck and a strong back and flexing calves. In the corner, shaded painstakingly, is a face half-drawn, of eyes gone dark with focus, a smile that's sharp and knowing. It's a Bucky page if there ever was one, and Steve panics.

"Hey Bucky," he says. "'S just random scribbles, y'know, so. Give it here, huh?"

Bucky ignores him. His eyes are intent now, looking at the drawings as if they're puzzles to decipher. Fingers tapping over each pencil stroke, expression thoughtful.

"Bucky, hey," Steve says again, more desperate. He steps forward, makes to grab the book. "Come on--"

"You forgot to say the magic word, Stevie," Bucky interrupts, pushing at Steve's chest gently. The heat of his palm stops Steve in his tracks, bleeding through Steve's shirt and going straight to his dick.

"--Steve?" Bucky tears his gaze from the book to look at Steve with concern. Steve makes a strangled noise, and Bucky's face softens, goes slack and tender, mouth curled around an indulgent smile.

"You okay, buddy?" he asks, and he hasn't moved his hand, is letting his thumb press into Steve's sternum in fact, and Steve—Steve can usually hide the way proximity makes his head spin, but the book is Steve's heart laid bare in Bucky's lap, and Bucky's hand is an anchoring and inciting force against Steve's skin, and the longing combined with the fear and the pleasure is all too much for just a  _fraction_  of a second.

"No," he blurts out. The words swim in his belly, ready to leap out of his mouth, ready to change things completely and utterly. He feels numb, then like an exposed nerve, twitching and pained. "'M, uh--"

"Embarrassed?" Bucky interjects knowingly. He’s distracted already, takes his hand from Steve's chest, goes back to peering avidly at the book. His gaze turns slightly faraway as his index finger and thumb frames the incomplete face on the corner of the page, hovering over the sweeps of charcoal. "You dont hafta be, Stevie. Serious. These are great. Better than great. You got a real future in art, if ya wanted it. These are..."

His voice goes soft, so soft, the kind of rough, throaty murmur that always gets Steve right in the gut. The heat that had spiked through him at Bucky's touch flares again, stirs low.

"They're somethin', is what I'm saying. Something... _special_."

All of a sudden, Bucky's face is inscrutable. His eyes shutter, and mouth firms into a line. He looks to the drawings, then to Steve, then to the drawings again. 

"Buck?" Steve asks, icewater flooding his veins at the speculation in Bucky’s furrowed brow. "What's wrong?"

Then Bucky's looking back up, eyes bright and blue, lashes dark, lips quirked almost ruefully. He rakes a hand through his hair, and looks so young and familiar and  _dear_  for a minute that Steve's knees almost knock together.

"Nothin', pal," he says. Swipes his tongue out to wet his lips, smiles again, bigger and brighter. "Nothin' at all."

He hands Steve the sketchbook with one hand and squeezes at Steve's nape with the other, knocking their foreheads together in an intimate, companionable gesture.

“Are you happy, Steve?” he asks, but doesn’t seem to expect an answer. Because then he's gone without waiting for a reply, padding off to the kitchen, whistling a melancholy Irish drinking tune as he goes. Like some kind of cyclone, blowing through the room only to leave stunned, breathless bystanders in his wake.

And Steve, well. He stares at the book in his hand, rubbing absently over the ghost of Bucky's touch on his chest, feeling distinctly like he's missed something important.

 

|

 

(Which, he finds out much later to no surprise, he has. 

Steve’s kind of an idiot sometimes. But then, so is Bucky.)

 

|

 

Two weeks pass from the moment on Steve’s bed, and Bucky doesn’t once ask to see Steve’s sketchbook again, even though Steve abandons all caution and begins to draw out in the open, sitting in the kitchen where the light is most interesting, pencil moving in rapid, angular _skritches_.

The tension between them becomes a real, living thing. Steve knows he’s not imagining it, not after the way Bucky’s mouth twists when Steve tentatively offers to show him one of his latest drawings, or when he flinches away from Steve’s casual touches. Not when he goes quiet and contemplative, spending all his time at work or out at the bar, coming back in the morning only to give Steve a perfunctory grin and a “See you later, buddy!”

Normally, Bucky’s the most solicitous, tactile person that Steve’s ever met, more octopus than human most days, full of easy affection and nosy curiosity. But this Bucky, the one who stumbles home stinking of whiskey with a lipstick print on his neck and a baleful look at the pencil in Steve’s hand—this Bucky is someone new.

Steve thinks about how perceptive Bucky is, and the way Steve wears his heart on his sleeve. And he wonders, with a wistful shrug and sorrow like a catch in his throat, if maybe that question he never had the courage to ask aloud got its answer anyway.

 

|

 

“Look, Buck.” Steve practices in the mirror, schooling his features to look impassive, toothbrush clutched in his hand. “I’m sorry. I know it’s odd, and…and inappropriate. I know I ruined everything. I’ll stop. I swear I will. Only, please. Please still be my friend. You’re my—and I don’t think I can—”

He chokes on his toothbrush and the rest of the sentence, unable to continue.

Doesn’t really know how he’d finish it, anyway.

 

|

 

What is he apologizing for, though? The drawings or the—the loving?

Which one is a greater invasion, a greater sin? Wanting someone who doesn’t want back, or capturing them in still frames, hoarding pieces that they don’t know they’ve given away?

Steve cradles the book in his hands, and thinks for awhile.

 

|

 

“What the fuck are you _doing_?”

It’s the middle of winter and there’s a small fire burning in the dirt outside Steve’s flat.

Bucky materializes out of nowhere to grab at Steve’s arm, yanking him away from the fire and into Bucky’s arms, a jumble of limbs and warmth and indignant huffing.

From the middle of the impromptu embrace, Steve mumbles, “’m burning some trash, ‘s all.”

Bucky’s arms tighten around Steve’s shoulders for a second before letting him up for some air, hands smoothing down to rest on Steve’s wrists, a firm grip.

“I went upstairs and saw your pencils ‘n things out, but your book wasn’t anywhere and then I saw this _goddamned_ fire, Jesus. Almost dropped dead, I was so scared, what are you _thinking,_ Steve? Why’re you—”

“You know why!” Steve shouts, and there’s a mutinous frown wresting its way across his face now. His chest heaves, and he jerks out of Bucky’s grip, steps back.

“You know why,” he echoes more quietly, pulse racing. It’s not Bucky’s fault. It’s not. He tries to calm himself down, because being hurt like this is for little kids, and he’s not Bucky’s _girl_ or anything. There were never any promises except ‘til the end of the line, and the line’s not finished yet, and Bucky’s still here. So Steve’s not mad. He’s not.

Bucky stares at Steve for a long moment, looking gobsmacked. It’s better than the brittle, false smiles of the past two weeks, so much better that Steve feels relief whoosh through him like a lake lashing against rock. But it still rises Steve’s hackles, the surprise on Bucky’s face.

“Don’t look so shocked, ya big jerk,” Steve chides, and shoves his hands in his pockets. “You haven’t looked me straight in the eye in ages.” He shrugs, kicks at the dirt. “Since you saw my sketches,” he adds. _Since you saw what it meant, what you meant to me. Since then._

Behind him, the fire burns merrily.

Bucky expression goes dark. “What’ve your little doodles got to do with _me_?” he asks snidely. Steve thinks he must not have hidden the pain in his eyes fast enough, because Bucky sighs and shoves a hand through his hair.

“No, aw, look. I’m not tryin’ to be an ass, Steve, I just—” He covers his eyes with one hand. “Christ.”

Steve shrugs again, steps back once more. “It’s fine,” he says dully. “I shouldn’t have been drawing you without permission anyhow. I shouldn’t have—well. It’s over now. You don’t hafta worry. We’re okay, and. Nothing’s changed.” He nods decisively, not meeting Bucky’s eyes. “Nothing’s changed.”

Bucky’s hand is hot on the back of Steve’s neck when he grasps at Steve’s nape, tilting Steve’s head to look up at him.

“What’dya mean, you shouldn’t have been drawing me without my permission?” he asks, and his voice is very, very serious. Steve tries valiantly to focus on the question, but his brain sort of blanks out at the feel of Bucky’s thumb pressing into a sore muscle at the base of Steve skull, the pleasure-pain of it, the proprietary grip.

He closes his eyes for a moment, and Bucky’s voice comes again, this time more strained. “Steve,” he says. “Come on. What—what are you talking about, huh?”

Steve cracks open his eyes. Bucky looks bewildered and suspicious, mouth slightly open and a furrow between his brows.

“You know,” he says. “The drawings in my sketchbook, you saw ‘em. Bucky, you had to see that—you had to see that they were all of you.”

Bucky laughs, a short, disbelieving laugh. “Even the apple?” he asks.

Steve raises an eyebrow. “Even the apple,” he confirms. “’Cause it reminded me of you, the time your ma baked me an apple cake for my birthday, and how you love the taste of ‘em but only if they’re cold and crisp.”

If he’s going to do this, he might as well go in whole hog. He’s burning his _sketchbook_ , for Christ’s sake.

Bucky closes his eyes. Counts to ten, mouth moving silently around the shapes of the numbers.

“You’re serious,” he says, when he opens his eyes again. They’re darker blue now, mellowed by some emotion Steve can’t place. “You’re actually serious.”

Steve frowns. “What else would I be?” he asks, offended. “If you didn’t know those drawings were of you, then—then why were you so _mad_? You were out every night with a different dame. Dancing and drinking and then running away like I had some kinda disease. I thought you were disgusted. I thought—I thought you _hated_ me.”

There’s a crack at the end of the word, and Bucky’s expression morphs again, this time into something devastated and open and mobile and self-deprecating.

“Don’t you know I could live a million years and never spend one second of ‘em hating you?” he asks. He brushes the sweaty hair at Steve’s nape, fingers rifling slowly. “That’s God’s honest truth, and I’m sorry as hell that I had you believing otherwise.”

Steve ducks his head, bowed by the gratitude that flows through him. “Then why—”

“I thought you were seein’ someone,” Bucky says, voice low. His mouth is next to Steve’s ear, and Steve shivers. “Thought you’d finally found someone who wised up on how—how swell you are, and that you two were going steady. That you hadn’t told me. That…” he trails off. Looks at Steve, in his eyes, a lighthouse beam, searching, leaving no stone unturned. Steve feels naked, almost. But whatever Bucky sees seems to reassure him, because he steels his shoulders and says:

“I thought I missed my chance.”

It’s so quiet, but each word pings through Steve, flares a dying light of hope in the pits of his belly, ignites his insides like a storm.

“Thought they were all for someone else, see,” Bucky continues, fingers tightening, curling through Steve’s hair, clutching him closer.  Steve leans in, catches Bucky’s waist in his hands. Rests his head against Bucky’s shoulder. There’s a raspy sound being dragged from Bucky’s throat, somewhere between a gasp and a groan.

“Thought all that pretty was for someone else, and it _killed_ me.”

That Bucky could look at Steve’s drawings and see that they were dripping with sentiment, soaked in love—but that he could _completely miss_ who they were even depicting—Steve shakes his head. Laughs, and laughs some more, a release of all the hysterical worry bound up tight like a knot in Steve’s limbs.

“You’re an idiot,” Steve says finally. Shakily. He looks up at Bucky, knows he can’t kiss him out in the open, with a fire still burning and the evening sky not quite dark yet. But he catches the collar of Bucky’s shirt and says fiercely, again, “You’re an _idiot_.”

“Yeah,” Bucky agrees, a small smile on his lips, wonder in his eyes. “Guess I am.”

Steve reaches a hand up to brush through Bucky’s hair, and this time, he can see that Bucky’s not unaffected. Can tell by the shiver in his touch. The restlessness in the way he moves, how he catches Steve’s wrist and dares to brush his mouth over the inside, skating along blue veins and a throbbing pulse point.

“It’s always gonna be for you,” Steve says quietly, with finality. A promise. “They’re all gonna be for you, always.”

Bucky drops his cheek onto Steve’s head and gathers him close, breathing in and out in even, steady gusts. They stand like that till the night falls and the stars begin to peek out from clouds, and even as the fire burns into ashes, it feels more like a beginning than any kind of ending ever should. So maybe it's both: the ending of one thing, so they can begin another thing. Something better, maybe.

Something really, really good.

 

|

 

Curled up in bed that night, sweaty and happy and still a little stunned underneath it all, Bucky turns to Steve and whispers:

“I can’t believe you _burned_ it, you nut. I liked that sketchbook. Plenty of potential for some nice, tasteful nudes, don'tcha think?”

Steve snorts, traces an audacious shape over the plane of Bucky’s chest, down over quivering stomach muscles, then still lower.

“I’ll draw new ones,” he offers, and grins at the shudder that runs through Bucky’s body. “I promise.”

 

|

 

And he does, too.  _Lots_ of 'em.


End file.
